I'm curious about nutrition.

What do you eat? It's a fraught question. My own friends run the gamut from militant carnivores to careful locavore vegans; some have strictly regimented diets and others make food strictly an afterthought. What you eat reflects your values and affects your health. Feelings about food run deep. So it's not surprising that there's a lot of conventional wisdom about nutrition -- or that a lot of it is contradictory.

It's hard to know who to trust. A lot of "experts" consulted by the popular press seem to base their advice more on intuition and fads than on any kind of empirical data. To be sure, a lot of these things are hard to study, for reasons that I hope to address in a future post. But the scientific and medical communities have built up a lot of solid research over the years that can answer a lot of questions and I'm curious to see what it can teach me.

I'm particularly interested in challenging my own assumptions. I have no particular qualification to talk about nutrition or health -- I want to use this series as a tool to develop my own understanding. My goals for this series are to:

• learn how my diet can help me avoid cardiovascular disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and cancer
• learn what I need to be doing in order to maintain a healthy weight, and
• to learn more about metabolic and cardiovascular diseases and interventions for them

by surveying the published literature. I’ll see you back here soon!</p>